Clearly, I need to do more arm workouts. My friend’s eight-year-old daughter asked me how old I was. I made the mistake of saying, “How old do you think I am?” She walked over to me and instructed me to lift my arm up and out to the side with a bent elbow. Then she patted my tricep flab to test its giggle-bility and pronounced me “forty!” I’m thirty-six. Apparently, my triceps age me.

Everyone laughed and my father-in-love (what we endearingly call my boyfriend’s dad) asked the eight-year-old how old she thought he was. “Fifty,” she guessed. In her mind I was ten years younger than a 78-year-old man.

This is my great-grandma.

As a little girl, I was fascinated by my great-grandma’s tricep flab, and she amazingly let me play with it. She was reasonably toned, but I could still whack her sagging arm back and forth. Born in 1899, she’d spent her early years washing her clothes by hand and cooking everything by hand, using a whisk instead of electric beaters. She was strong. Some tricep flab is going to happen to the best of us.